aining of a
certificate of reasonable doubt. It usually takes that long."

The young banker sat there staring out of the window, and Steger
observed, "It is a bit complicated, isn't it?"

"Well, I should say so," returned Frank, and he added to himself:
"Jail! Five days in prison!" That would be a terrific slap, all things
considered. Five days in jail pending the obtaining of a certificate of
reasonable doubt, if one could be obtained! He must avoid this! Jail!
The penitentiary! His commercial reputation would never survive that.

Chapter XXXII

The necessity of a final conference between Butler, Mollenhauer, and
Simpson was speedily reached, for this situation was hourly growing more
serious. Rumors were floating about in Third Street that in addition to
having failed for so large an amount as to have further unsettled
the already panicky financial situation induced by the Chicago fire,
Cowperwood and Stener, or Stener working with Cowperwood, or the other
way round, had involved the city treasury to the extent of five hundred
thousand dollars. And the question was how was the matter to be kept
quiet until after election, which was still three weeks away. Bankers
and brokers were communicating odd rumors to each other about a check
that had been taken from the city treasury after Cowperwood knew he was
to fail, and without Stener's consent. Also that there was danger
that it would come to the ears of that very uncomfortable political
organization known as the Citizens' Municipal Reform Association,
of which a well-known iron-manufacturer of great probity and moral
rectitude, one Skelton C. Wheat, was president. Wheat had for years been
following on the trail of the dominant Republican administration in a
vain attempt to bring it to a sense of some of its political iniquities.
He was a serious and austere man---one of those solemn, self-righteous
souls who see life through a peculiar veil of duty, and who, undisturbed
by notable animal passions of any kind, go their way of upholding the
theory of the Ten Commandments over the order of things as they are.

The committee in question had originally been organized to protest
against some abuses in the tax department; but since then, from election
to election, it had been drifting from one subject to another, finding
an occasional evidence of its worthwhileness in some newspaper comment
and the frightened reformation of some minor political official who
ended